Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.

Accepted Paper:

Climate change and the combined and uneven 'geo-spiritual formation' of the Anthropocene  
Bronislaw Szerszynski (Lancaster University)

Paper short abstract:

I sketch a general theory of ‘geo-spiritual formations’. I argue that mythic responses to climate change have to be understood in the context of wider accelerating flows of matter and energy. I suggest that distinct ‘naturecultures’ are being convened into a global multinatural system.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I first argue that rather than merely exploring the role that religion and indigenous cultures might play as a normative bulwark against environmental change or as a source of alternative visions for the future, we have first to develop a more general theory of 'geo-spiritual formations', one which includes awareness of the way that forms of the sacred may themselves be helping to propel environmental change. I draw on the Amerindian 'perspectivism' of Vivierios De Castro, the French social theory of Giles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Georges Bataille, to show how the interdisciplinary sciences of the Earth can start to make ontological space for spirit.

Secondly, I argue that ethnographic accounts of religious and mythological responses to climate change have to be understood in the context of the wider set of interlinked changes in the Earth system discussed under the heading of the Anthropocene. Thus spiritual understandings of changes in seasonal weather, the water cycle and local biodiversity have to be understood within the same framework as the spiritual dynamics surrounding the undermining of local subsistence and gift economies, accelerated global flows of matter and energy, and the resulting uneven global distribution of value, order and entropy.

Thirdly, I conclude by suggesting that what were once distinct territorialised 'naturecultures' in which humans engaged in particular situated patterns of interaction with animals, spirits and other beings are increasingly being convened into a global multinatural system, what we might call a 'combined and uneven geo-spiritual formation'.

Panel P27
Climate change as 'end of the world': mythological cosmogonies and imaginaries of change
  Session 1